its own reward
by isawet
Summary: A Kryptonian and a human crash into the Phantom Zone. Stop me if you've heard it before. (Spoilers for Man of Steel, Faora-centric).


Faora knows they are in the Phantom Zone before she realizes she's facedown in a corridor about to vented out into the vacuum. She can feel it, the nothingness, the emptiness. The Phantom Zone is more vacant than the whole of space, a black hole of feeling. She pushes herself up and touches her breather-functioning. She pushes off the ground hard, meaning to bound, and leaps a very small distance. Sloppy, she thinks grimly, to already be so reliant on the yellow sun of Earth, and unhelpful as she is currently so very far away from it. She runs, instead, focused on the nearest hatchway door, and almost misses the dull green and white swirled Earth-man slumped against the wall.

Faora doesn't have time to think. She can hear the whine of the flimsy Earth-craft being peeled from the hull of their ship. Not meant to withstand space, she thinks, her lip curling, and the debris in the corridor shakes as the ship fights to stabilize its artificial gravity while suffering a serious hullbreach. Faora estimates it will hold for perhaps fifteen more beats of her heart, fifteen beats to get through the next hatchway and seal off the affected areas to sustain a pressure that won't have her eyeballs bouncing off the facemask of her breather as they burst.

Faora doesn't have time to think, but she was bred almost specifically not to think, so she does what she was she was taught to do-act on instinct until given orders. She closes her fingers around the rough scratch fabric of the human's jacket and drags him at a full run to the hatchway, grunting with effort and tossing him through before turning and skating her fingers across the controls. The ship hums, and she can hear the lock-snap-boom as it seals off breached areas and adjusts the interior atmosphere. Her breather beeps-this area is secure and safe for her to breathe.

She touches the clasps behind her ears and rolls the human onto his back with her foot. His arm dangles at an unnatural angle, but his chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm. He will live. She bends over him and puts on her breather on him. It beeps and she turns away. She needs to find out if Lor-Em is dead, if Jax-Ur is dead. She needs to return to her General.

/

Faora has walked the length and the breadth of what's left of the fleet of Krypton, and it is not as bad as she would have thought. Leave it those fragile sun-beings to be unable to take down something so ill-equipped as a prison ship. She thinks longingly of the Armada ships of Before and shakes her head quickly. There is no use to fixate on the Loss, as General Zod had called it, the Cleansing, the Chance. The chance for something new, something Faora believes in. The harvesting of Bloodlines until the best and the brightest rise up and flourish on the New Krypton. This is something that makes sense to Faora, something she believes, and so she finds a screen and pulls up ship diagnostics. Only three levels carry breathable air, two more are sealed off enough that she could walk them with a breather. The engine is badly damaged, but engineering is one of the levels that is accessible to her, and that is... something. Faora takes an even breath and does the very last scan. Her eyes track over the results and she is careful that her chest does not stutter.

Two life signs present and no more.

/

The next task is inventory. Faora grits her teeth-such a task is for Tor-An, not a first lieutenant to General Zod. But she counts. Food first, thin chewy sheets of longtravel spacefare, a few pallets of course colony linen, some other supplies. She finds a case of tools and sets them aside for further examination. Everything she salvages, she drags to a medium sized room. She's raiding a breather unit supply cabinet when she hears the squeak drag of a footstep behind her-the human's boot on the metal floor. She moves with his strike, taking it across her shoulder instead of the back of her head, and darts in with a grab for the pressure point in the soft skin of the elbow-the pressure point of a Kryptonian. The human grunts but rather than being immobilized, strikes out with an animal's swipe, a bit of sharp edged metal in his fingers. It razors open a hair-thin slice from the scalp of her temple down to the edge of her jaw, but then his element of surprise is gone.

Faora reaches out and closes her hand around where his arm is broken, clenching down to feel bone fragments shift in her grip, and he collapses to the floor, barely conscious. Faora uses the thin flex of her sleeve to wipes the blood from her eyes. Grudgingly, she admires him, to keep attacking a superior force such as herself with such determination. She drags him to the supply room and leaves him slumped against the wall, curled in on his arm. She crosses to her pile of salvage and finds two thin pieces of metal, strong and just the right length.

"Can you dress your own wounds?" she asks, tossing them at him. They clang off the wall and roll to a stop. There's a long silence, and Faora figures he'll either agree or die. Either way, she has to figure out how to fix the engine, and she turns away, giving him the deliberate insult of her back.

:"Yes," he says, finally, and the next sound is the crack of setting broken bone, pained breathing as he splints his arm.

/

There is an uneasy truce aboard the prison ship. The human keeps to himself, and when Faora is out doing repairs he takes half the rations, stacking them against his side of the room, as well as half the linens, which he uses to create a makeshift mattress. Faora is irritated the idea did not occur to her first, and she stubbornly sleeps in her armour for two more nights before giving up and fashioning her own bedding. She tells him in clipped tones where the latrine is and leaves him a water filter when he goes to relieve himself-at this point she's had to cannibalize several of the levels, leaving them with limited space. If he dies the stench will be intolerable.

He tries to kill her in her sleep once, and she rebreaks his arm in response. He drags himself back to his corner and she glares at him, eating a square of the tasteless foodbars.

"It was healing crooked anyway," he says, and grins. Faora likes him even more for it, which just makes her angrier, and she stalks out to pace the ship again.

/

She uncovers a command key in a pile of rubble, etched with Zod's crest, and she takes it back to the room with her when she goes to eat again, rolling it between her fingers as she quenches her thirst.

"My name is Nathan," the human says. He's sitting on his bedding, his arm bound to his chest.

"I do not care," she says.

"I'm named for my old man," he continues like she hasn't spoken. "he was in the service too-runs in the family, you know."

Faora, in fact, does know, but that doesn't mean she wants to discuss it with such an annoyingly inferior being. She takes out her personal blade and begins to service it, ignoring him completely. To her satisfaction, he stops talking, and she sharpens the edge of the blade, wipes it down until it shines with a deadly dull gleam. When she looks up he's watching her curiously.

"Why do you carry that thing, anyway? Advanced alien race such as yourself?"

Faora looks at him like he's rockdust beneath her boots, but he just grins. "It is symbolic," she says, the grating of her own voice surprising her. "A symbol of my status."

He shifts and reaches over for a long drink. "You earned it? Like... through battle?"

Faora stiffens at the insult. "It is my _birthright_. I was bred to protect Krypton. My very existence is to lead soldiers for the house of Dru, for the good of Krypton." It is more than she intended to say, and she falls silent, slipping the blade into its sheath.

"I can understand that," he says, and pulls a knife from his boot, flipping it to look at the handle. "My grandfather's," he says, "eighteen year old infantryman, took it off a high ranking Nazi."

Privately, Faora approves. Besting a superior opponent is an acceptable point of pride to pass along a Bloodline. But his attitude grates-as if they are equals. "We are returning to your Earth," she tells him, just to wipe the smile from his face. "I expect General Zod has already conquered it. You will live only long enough to see your world turn to ash."

His expression tightens, his fingers clench around the dagger. Faora smiles at him and lays down for sleep. "Why do you even keep me alive, then?" he asks, and her smile melts into a scowl. She ignores him, and decides if he tries to slit her throat again, she will crush him and eject him into space.

She wakes up the next morning to him doing one handed pushups and singing. He greets her cheerily and Faora wishes she could slam the door behind her.

/

Faora is running low on busywork. She pulls out her battle armour instead, to oil it until it is as it was when she first set her eyes on it, shining the scuffs and battlescars. She runs her fingers along her family crest.

"It is Ul," she tells the human, for no particular reason, and he looks up from where he's picking at his fingernails. "It means to protect."

"So tell me," he says, gesturing with the small knife he's using to tidy his cuticles. "don't you ever want peace? Retirement? Nice fat alien pension?"

"My only purpose is to serve," she says. "My Bloodline exists for no other reason."

"You could change," he suggests, and Faora tires of speaking to him.

"No," she says coldly. "I will not."

/

She stalks to the furthest reaches of the ship, all the way to the console. She dips a finger into the slot for the command key and takes a deep breath, pulling Zod's from within her sleeve. She holds it above the slot and feels the pull. She slackens her grip and it flies in.

"For Krypton," she says, and slaps her palm against it. The ship sputters. "Help me," she says to it. Zod and Jor-El had both wanted Krypton to live on. "I am the last hope," she says. Something flickers-

"wanted for you," someone is saying, and she turns. Jor-El is there, facing empty space. He flickers in and out, his voice stutters. "-bridge between two worlds," he says.

"Help _me_," Faora commands, and Jor-El turns. He looks directly at her.

"To you Krypton gives the power of choice," he says, and disintegrates. Faora does not fall to her knees, but it is a close thing. Instead she kneels, a smooth motion.

"I have failed," she says aloud. "We have failed. I am the last."

Beneath her, the ship's engines come alive.

/

Faora finds the human in the Genesis chamber, looking in horror at the vines. "This is how you are born," he says, "I think I'm gonna be sick." To his credit, he does not vomit.

Faora looks out over the pods, each holding a terminated fetus. "This is how we are grown," she corrects dispassionately. "The rich and the powerful chose which Bloodlines to continue, which Bloodlines would fill each role. General Zod wanted reform. He wanted a Cleansing." Jor-El wanted choice, she thinks, but no, she still doesn't understand that. Faora is pleased to be a soldier. She is sure she has done her Bloodline proud. But still, Jor-El's words stick in her head.

"You know," the human says, turning away from the vines, "if you had come to us for help we probably would have. Only survivors of a lost planet? Our first contact with alien life? We could have been allies."

"We could not," Faora says simply, but she thinks, _bridges_. The human makes a noise of disgust. He stalks away, and Faora stands there, looking out at the dead children of her dead world, for a long time.

/

Faora-Ul stands in front of a bay window at the helm of the last ship of Krypton, next to a human soldier. They are the only ones of their races in five million lightyears. It sounds, Faora thinks, like the beginning of a very poor joke.

"I still don't know why you're keeping me alive," the human says. It is not the first time he has said so. Faora looks out the window at the stars, drawing ever nearer. She has set a course for Earth. She has not decided what she will do when they get there.

"Because, Nathan," she says, "I do not want to be the last."


End file.
